The Training Ground (16 page)
The Rifles
A
UGUST 19, 1846
F
inally, Davis’s rifles arrived. A Treasury Department cutter delivered crates full of the brand-new weapons to the sands of Brazos Island. On August 24, armed and ready, the First Mississippi boarded steamships for the long journey up the Rio Grande to Camargo.
They were lucky to get the ride. Taylor’s ambitious plans to move his army upriver by steamboat were solidly at odds with reality. Like so many other aspects of the Mexican War, in which outdated War of 1812 mind-sets had to be replaced with a more up-to-date approach, the U.S. Army’s approach to logistics remained antiquated. This had already become apparent through Taylor’s inability to get his hands on enough wagons to haul supplies. It was even more obvious on the subject of water craft. The army had very few steamboats, and the U.S. Navy, which had begun blockading Mexican ports, lacked the sort of shallow-draft vessels necessary to navigate inland waters. The few that existed were often barely afloat, thanks to shipworms boring into their wooden hulls. The impact was immediate. “My operations are completely paralyzed,” Taylor groused.
The solution was to rent steamboats from private contractors. There was no set fee structure, so each ship’s captain set his own price. Inevitably, deals were made and then broken by captains seeking top dollar for their services. Troop movements were delayed for days as soldiers awaited their boat. “She is expected down every hour,” Napoleon Dana had written about their promised vessel, the
Aid,
a side-wheel shallow-draft steamboat weighing 137 tons. “And I think it highly probable that we will move day after tomorrow, possibly tomorrow, and maybe not for several days. We are in readiness at any moment.”
Dana was overly optimistic. The
Aid
’s owner wanted $250 to deliver soldiers to Camargo, but the quartermaster would go no higher than $100. Negotiations broke down and then ended altogether. A second vessel, the
Neva,
arrived in a pouring rain on June 27 to pick up Dana and elements of the First and Seventh infantries. “This will save us sixty miles’ march over bad roads,” he exulted in a two-paragraph letter just an hour before shipping out.
The
Neva
was an accident waiting to happen. Its three boilers were weak, overheating, and liable to explode without warning. The strain of carrying five hundred barrels of provisions, plus men and personal belongings, would be far too much and the risks far too high. A disgusted Taylor decided the
Neva
would return to Port Isabel for new boilers. The good news for Dana and his men was that they spent the night aboard the steamboat as they awaited the decision about whether to proceed. Rain was drenching Fort Brown and Matamoros. A roof over their heads was far preferable to yet another miserable, muddy night in a tent. The bad news was that, like many of his fellow soldiers, including Grant, Dana ended up walking to Camargo.
The journey was predictably horrendous. “During the day the sun is very powerful, making it hot and sultry with scarcely a breath of air stirring,” he wrote one day. Because of the heat, there was an evening march and a morning march; the long, ragged column slept in the middle of the day and night. Discipline was lax, and the natural obstacles, such as the heat and the waist-deep mud the men encountered while wading the recently flooded river bottoms, prevented speedy progress.
Camargo was on the San Juan River, at a point three miles upriver from its confluence with the Rio Grande. The trek from Matamoros, though just a little more than a hundred miles, averaged nine days for most outfits. “After a fatiguing march,” Grant wrote to Julia, “my company has arrived at this place. When we left Matamoros on the 5th of August, it had been raining a great deal, so that the roads were very bad, and, as you well may guess, in this low latitude, the weather was none the coolest. The troops suffered considerably from heat and thirst. Matamoros is a perfect paradise compared to this place.”
Camargo had recently been flooded, and the high-water mark could be seen six feet up doorframes in some parts of town. The plaza itself had been scrubbed of grass and was now just a barren patch of white sand. Those floods, and the influx of American soldiers, were all the motivation most local residents needed to evacuate to high ground inland. There they planned to rebuild their city.
Dana’s letter to Sue describing Camargo was typically elaborate. “It has some fine houses but none over one story, and like all Mexican houses, flat and tiled on top such as you hear of at Jerusalem in olden times. But like all the Mexican towns we have seen, all the houses on the suburbs are made of cane and thatched with straw. None have wood floors or glass windows, and in fact most of them have no windows at all.”
“We are now encamped, my dearest wife, in the plaza, or public square, of Camargo, K and I companies on one side, C and F on another, and D and E on another, whilst the guardhouse, hospital adjutant’s office, and so forth occupy the hills. The church is on my side of the square and is by far the prettiest one we have yet seen, though its style of architecture is ancient and odd. It is also the only one we have seen with a finished steeple. It is quite a picturesque building and like all Mexican churches has three bells of different sounds in its steeple.” As Dana and the other Americans would soon learn, the bells rang four times a day, providing a natural source of reveille each morning and a nine o’clock reminder to go to bed each night.
T
HE FIRST MISSISSIPPI’S
steamboat journey to Camargo may have been less physically demanding than that of the soldiers who marched, but it was no pleasure cruise. In fact, they might have been better off on foot. “Everybody dissatisfied, unhappy, the boat fetid and stinking, and many, very many, sick. I was suffering dreadfully with the universal complaint, diarrhea, so hot, such a dreadful stench from the necessities, biscuits half cooked, no place to poke one’s head in where a moment’s comfort could be found, night or day. The sick strewed about, some delirious and crying out for their friends. I became so weak I could scarcely walk,” wrote one member of Davis’s regiment in his journal.
The ordeal lasted just six days. As they traveled inland, the oceanfront humidity of Brazos Island was replaced by the still and dry desert heat. The swirling sand was replaced by the fine grit of desert dust. As the Mississippians’ boat veered from the Rio Grande and up the San Juan for the final three miles of their journey, the landscape remained brown and covered with scrub. That is, until Camargo hove into view. White tents now carpeted the riverbanks. A thin haze of fine caliche dust, stirred up by men and horses, hung over the town like a pall. Taylor’s army had overflowed the town square and was now camped along the San Juan, some fifteen thousand strong.
Camargo lacked Brazos Island’s infuriating swarms of flies and mosquitoes but more than made up for those pests with deadly scorpions and biting ants. And those thousands of American soldiers camped along the riverbank were once again breeding cholera and dysentery by urinating in the river and using the water for cooking, drinking, and bathing (“The water here,” one insightful volunteer wrote of life on the Rio Grande, “opens the bowels like a melting tar”) — or in many cases, by
not
bathing at all. A report issued months later by Senior Surgeon R. S. Satterlee noted that “many patients received into our hospitals who probably have not washed their persons for months, and who for weeks have not changed their underclothes, and who are not only filthy but covered with vermin. This remark does not apply, of course, to our brave and faithful soldiers who are an ornament to any service, but particularly to the recruits, a great part of whom are indolent and of course filthy.”
The result was an appalling number of deaths. Unmarked graves soon lined the San Juan. Regimental bands so often played a death march for funerals that Camargo’s mockingbirds learned to mimic the refrain.
The First Mississippi had already sent 108 men home because of illness. Another 70 were so sick that it appeared they would soon join them, and a handful of Davis’s men had died. This had reduced their strength by just over 20 percent. Davis, however, was in robust health. This was fortunate, since he had marched off to war seeking glamour and glory; a sickness-related discharge would have had just the opposite effect.
All Davis could do was make the best of the situation and await further orders. He didn’t have to wait long. On September 7, the Rifles marched out of Camargo as part of a three-division American invasion force that was pushing hundreds of miles south into the heart of Mexico. The road led first to Monterrey, where it was rumored that the Mexicans were fortifying to make a stand. Should the war go on, that same road would continue all the way south to Mexico City. The First Mississippi, who would soon be rechristened the Mississippi Rifles, in honor of their being the first rifle regiment in U.S. Army history, would be playing catch-up with the other American squads. General Worth and the Second Division had crossed the river into Mexico on August 19.
Owing to his lack of wagons, Taylor had chosen to leave the bulk of his volunteer force in Camargo, destined to wait for their short enlistments to expire so they could turn right around and head home. Taylor had handpicked those outfits that would accompany him into the field. By sending them forward, Taylor was acknowledging the Mississippi Rifles, though reduced in strength, as an elite volunteer element. This was due to the discipline and military air Davis had instilled — and also to Davis’s past relationship with Taylor.
It was just as Davis had wanted it.
Supply Train
S
EPTEMBER 13, 1846
P
romotion to the leadership of Company C back in July marked the first time in his career that Grant officially had men serving under him. The company was the smallest grouping of soldiers to receive an alphanumeric designation. A battalion was a group of companies that assembled to execute a specific task but then separated when the task was finished. A regiment was a permanent collection of ten companies, a brigade was a collection of regiments, and a division was a collection of brigades.
But the company was the basis of all those groupings. Army regulations stipulated that each be composed of fifty-five soldiers, including a lieutenant and a noncommissioned officer. Before the war, the company had been considered the perfect outfit to man frontier forts, making it feasible to imagine that, had Grant been similarly promoted in peacetime, his command would have been far more prestigious. But there was no frontier outpost for Sam Grant. In fact, he didn’t even have a full complement of soldiers. Wartime attrition had affected unit size throughout the army, and the strength of Company C hovered right around three dozen men.
Nonetheless, it was a command, and Grant was rightfully pleased to be given the job. The highlight of his brief tenure was the long march from Matamoros to Camargo. Company C was part of a brigade that accompanied the cavalry and artillery to Camargo via an overland route along the Rio Grande’s south shore. Grant got to know his men, copying Taylor’s practice of memorizing each soldier’s name. These were the soldiers he would soon lead into battle. Grant prepared for that moment as he marched, analyzing their character strengths and weaknesses, just as he analyzed his own, so that when it came time to fight, he would know the strong and the weak, assigning them missions accordingly.
T
HE GLORY OF
command was fleeting. The exigencies of the service being what they were, and with the bulk of Taylor’s armies being transported by mules (the army’s Quartermaster Department had sent buyers through the Mississippi River valley, purchasing as many of the animals as possible), it was decided in August that someone with a talent for handling equine creatures should be appointed as the regiment’s new supply clerk. That new quartermaster was Sam Grant.
He was not the least bit happy about it. Just as there were vast differences between horses and mules, so there was a gap between leading an infantry company into battle and dispensing its supplies. Disparaging the Quartermaster Corps was something of a sport among troops on the Mexican border (“the jackass of a quartermaster,” Dana had written, expressing a typical sentiment), and the last thing Grant desired was to be so downgraded. He fought back. “I respectfully protest against being assigned to a duty which removes me from sharing in the dangers and honors of a service with my company at the front, and respectfully ask to be permitted to resume my place in line,” he immediately wrote to Brevet Colonel John Garland, his commander.
Garland’s response was swift and succinct. “Lt. Grant is respectfully informed that his protest can not be considered. Lt. Grant was assigned to duty as Quartermaster and Commissary because of his observed ability, skill, and persistency in the line of duty. The commanding officer is confident that Lt. Grant can best serve his country in present emergencies under this assignment.” If there was any doubt, Garland added in closing: “Lt. Grant will continue to perform his assigned duties.”
Grant was unaware of the oblique honor, but his reassignment had come directly from General Taylor, who had noticed Grant’s diligent work ethic as far back as Corpus Christi. Taylor had been riding Old Whitey along the beach one day when he observed Grant overseeing a work party clearing underwater obstacles. The men weren’t doing the job to Grant’s satisfaction, so he had waded in up to his waist to direct them, much to the amusement of onlooking officers. They mocked him from the shore for his drenched uniform. Taylor quickly shut them up. “I wish I had more officers like Grant who would stand ready to set a personal example when needed,” Taylor had said.
Taylor was actually paying the young lieutenant an enormous compliment with the assignment. The steady movement of supplies to frontline troops was vital. The flow began back in Philadelphia, at the Schuylkill Arsenal, the Quartermaster Department’s main depot. The U.S. Army had divided its logistical support into three units: Ordnance, Subsistence, and Quartermaster. The first group was in charge of bullets and guns, and the second oversaw bulk foods (in particular the barrels of salt pork, flour, and cured beef that formed the bulk of the army diet). Everything else that a soldier might need fell under the quartermaster’s purview: uniforms, tents, saddles, manuals, and so on. However, the quartermaster was also in charge of transportation, establishing and maintaining supply depots, and ensuring a steady flow of provisions and material to the troops. Since among these provisions and materials were bullets, guns, and food, quartermasters were actually responsible for every aspect of supply, even those aspects they weren’t officially responsible for. But whereas Ordnance and Subsistence operated in the rear, quartermasters were constantly shuttling to and from the front lines, delivering supplies.
Before the war, the Quartermaster Department had been restricted from accumulating more than six months of provisions and gear, basing their figures on the small size of America’s standing army. Now, as volunteers flooded the ranks and there was an instant demand for ammunition, uniforms, shoes, and transportation, quartermasters scrambled to purchase equipment. The plea for tents was so great that a national shortage of the “duck” cotton used most commonly in their construction forced the use of flimsy muslin instead. A lack of shoes had the army parceling out contracts to cobblers. Fabric was purchased in bulk and then delivered to private seamstresses, who sewed uniforms from the comfort of their homes.
From Schuylkill, the goods were shipped to a second depot in New Orleans, then loaded on sailing ships for the journey to Port Isabel. Steamboats ferried them upriver to Camargo. There the all-important supplies were distributed to individual units, then loaded onto mules and wagons for the march into Mexico. Here the problem turned from one of production into one of transportation — and of mules in particular. If these notoriously stubborn animals could not be made to perform their job, all that production begun in far-off Philadelphia would be for naught. Taylor needed diligent officers who were good with pack animals. Grant failed to notice the compliment. Happy or not, on August 14 he officially became regimental quartermaster.
On September 5, the Fourth Infantry marched away from Camargo, bound for Monterrey. When General Worth had passed through two weeks earlier, he had had the foresight to put his men to work widening those trails into a passable road. It was soon a most busy thoroughfare.
Over the course of four weeks, some 6,640 American soldiers, 1,500 pack mules, and 180 wagons carrying 160,000 rations plied that hot, dusty path — the largest movement of American troops in history. Taylor’s quartermasters hadn’t been able to meet the general’s urgent demand for a mass production of supply wagons, so the few he possessed were forced to make an endless round-trip journey. To make the wagoneer’s job easier, Taylor insisted that all soldiers and officers travel without personal luxuries — no camp tables, chairs, or other superfluous items. “We will live like real soldiers on nothing but hard fare to eat, hard ground to walk on, only blankets to sleep on, and lots of watchfulness,” one young officer wrote to his family back home. “It will be a fine life to make us hearty and strong.”
Grant set to managing the regimental supplies with all the professionalism and enthusiasm he could muster. His day began before sunrise, just after the troops had eaten breakfast and begun their march. The enlisted men carried all their personal belongings, including clothing, ammunition, bedding, and a haversack containing the midday meal. Many had begun carrying their water in gourd canteens, preferring them to the army-issue metal or india-rubber variety, which gave the water a foul aftertaste. Officers, however, marched with just a canteen and their weapon. They were entirely dependent on Grant for their food, tents, personal items, and bedding.
Because of the lack of wagons, Grant, the teamsters, and the soldiers under his command then spent several hours loading their mules for the day’s march. This was a frustrating undertaking in and of itself. “The tents and cooking utensils had to be made into packages, so that they could be lashed to the back of mules. Sheet iron kettles, tent poles, and mess chests were inconvenient articles to transport in that way. It took several hours to get ready to start each morning, and by the time we were loaded some of the mules first loaded would be tired of standing so long with their loads on their backs. Sometimes one would start to run, bowing his back and kicking up until he scattered his load; others would lie down and try to disarrange their loads by attempting to get on top of them by rolling on them; others with tent poles for part of their loads would manage to run a tent pole on one side of a sapling while they would take the other,” he wrote.
Grant added a grace note to his frustrations: “I am not aware of ever having used a profane expletive in my life, but I would have the charity to excuse those who may have done so, if they were in charge of a train of Mexican pack mules.”
Lieutenant Samuel French, an artillery lieutenant who graduated from West Point in Grant’s class, wrote of a typical morning loading the mules: “One was lassoed and throwed and the pack saddle put on. Then, for his load, two barrels of crackers were securely put on,” French remembered. “He surveyed the load from right to left with rolling eyes, squatted low, humped himself, sprang forward, stood on his forefeet and commenced high kicking, exploded the barrels of hardtack with his heels, threw the biscuits in the air with the force of a dynamite bomb, and ran away with the empty barrels dangling behind, as badly scared as a dog with tin buckets tied to his tail.”
The mules were the most obvious symbol of a very frustrating time for Grant. He felt powerless. He hated his new job, was angry that he hadn’t seen Julia in a year and upset that her father had prohibited them from getting married during his last leave. Most of all, he deeply resented having to wage war in Mexico.
To Grant, Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma were proof that the Mexicans had lost. Their insistence on retreating farther and farther into their country rather than surrendering enraged him. “If these Mexicans were any kind of people they would have given us a chance to whip them enough some time ago and now the difficulty would be over; but I do believe they think they will outdo us by keeping us running over the country after them,” he wrote to Julia.
His letter of September 6 was one rant after another. “Julia, ain’t you getting tired of hearing war, war, war? I am truly tired of it. Here it is now five months that we have been at war and as yet but two battles. I do wish this one would close. If we have to fight I wish we could do it all at once and then make friends,” Grant wrote bitterly.
Despite his misery, Grant was a professional. He deftly guided his complement of wagons and mules through the ranks of men marching the dusty road into Mexico. They may have started every morning far behind the troops, but by the time the soldiers made camp each night, Grant had already arrived and unloaded his tents, poles, cooking gear, and provisions. “There was no road so obstructed,” wrote Second Lieutenant Alexander Hays, “but that Grant, in some mysterious way, would work his train through and have it in the camp of his brigade before the campfires were lighted.”
Not all quartermasters were as ambitious as Grant. There were several instances of baggage trains never catching up with the columns of soldiers, forcing the officers to sleep out in the open, without even a thin wool blanket between them and the hard ground. The desert temperatures, which rose to such withering heights during the day, plummeted each night. Cold and lack of food had a crippling effect on morale, so Grant’s nascent talents as a quartermaster were greatly appreciated by the men of the Fourth. He was so busy that he didn’t write a single letter to Julia during the entire march.
Despite the fact that the United States had officially invaded Mexico, the truth was that the extent of the American incursion was minimal until August 1846. From Port Isabel to Matamoros to Camargo, Taylor had simply followed the course of the Rio Grande inland. He hugged the border between the two nations, positioning all his troops within miles — and often within eyesight — of the river. As invasions went, it was rather modest, from close-up seemingly just another chapter in the decade-long border war between Mexico and Texas.
At first the penetration from Camargo to Monterrey was more of the same. The American army traveled in a west-by-northwest fashion, parallel to the Rio Grande, until they got to Mier, 120 miles from Matamoros. There they wheeled ninety degrees to the left and marched seventy-five miles due southwest into the heart of Mexico. Mier was atop a hill, with two churches, streets naturally paved by the rocky ground, and two streams running through the middle that came together to form a large creek, known, unforgettably, as the Alamo. Mier had recently been savaged by Comanches. After the locals pleaded for protection, it was agreed that a force of a hundred American soldiers would remain behind in town.
On a map, it was almost possible to draw a straight line that began in Washington, D.C., passed through Mier, and ended in Monterrey. This line represented both the genesis and the hopeful conclusion of the Mexican War. Taylor, for one, didn’t think that General Ampudia and the Mexican army would defend Monterrey. The Mexican retreat, he believed, had just been a way of testing the United States’ will. The Mexican army would cede those towns along the Rio Grande, knowing that the U.S. Army would one day leave, after which they could be recaptured. Only by penetrating deep into Mexico and once again defeating the Mexican army could the Americans show a willingness to elevate the conflict beyond a mere border squabble — even if it meant marching all the way to Mexico City.